Abstract
Distributed practice, a learning strategy that can inform curriculum design, deliberately spaces out opportunities or memory storage and retrieval of taught information to develop deep, robust and long-term learning for students (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Massed practice (better known to students as ‘cramming’), in contrast, involves material being studied for similar periods but without (or with little) spacing between such memory-storage-retrieval opportunities. In such cases, knowledge and skill competency are often forgotten. This translates clearly into assessment, where those who have learned in a ‘distributed curriculum’ compared to a ‘massed curriculum’ can show significant learning gains (Hattie, 2008) from the longer-lasting and deeper learning offered by spacing learning opportunities out, leading to what is referred to as the ‘distributed practice’, ‘spacing’ or ‘lag’ effect (Dunlosky et al., 2013). This effect is well documented in cognitive psychology (Latimier et al., 2020), having been demonstrated for students across ages and abilities, inside and outside of classroom environments (Agarwal, 2019; Nazari and Ebersbach, 2019), and is noted as one of the interventions that leads to the greatest learning gains for students (Hattie, 2008). Why does distributed practice work, what does it look like and where does it happen in the curriculum?